Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

In 2024 YeahWrite’s free workshop is taking you all the places you want to be published — or at least helping you have the best chance possible at getting there. Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And don’t forget to check out the Writing Resources tab up **gestures vaguely upwards** there to find our previous workshop series on prompts and editing (not at the same time).

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

By the abyss, we mean your submissions queue

So we didn’t scare you off with all the legal stuff last month, and you still want to be published. Great! We want that for you, too. This month we’re diving into the who of publishing: who’s your market? What are your target readers like? Who do you want to publish you? And most of all, do those things match up with what you’re writing?

Let’s get some preliminary vocabulary out of the way before we start.

Gaze: Parallax is the phenomenon where objects change appearance depending on where they are viewed from. For example, if you and your friend take a photograph of the same subject at the same time, it still won’t look the same because you can’t occupy the same physical space. You will see things in one photo that you don’t in the other. Social parallax is the phenomenon where these differences in perception are affected not by physical position but by each observer’s circumstances, their demographics and personal histories. In creative media we often call this “gaze” and it can be an average of the social parallax of a group of people with a common characteristic; for example, the “male gaze” or the “white gaze” is a position of social parallax that roughly matches the “place” that the named characteristic would put that audience.

Voice: The way words and sentences are put together to give the audience an impression of the context of the narrator or viewpoint character. This may include bending the rules of grammar and spelling, or simply using the organization of the text–the unifying principle is a consistency of stylistic elements, congruent with the character’s self-image and emotional state.

Market: an acquirer (often a purchaser but not always) of writing, such as a publisher or publication.

Audience: A consumer of writing. Readers have specific desires for things they want to engage with, and they bring their lived experience to the reading process. But readers also share commonalities of want, and these groups are audiences.

Got it? Great. Let’s do this.

Who’s your market?

There are two basic ways to write. You can either choose your market and try to write for it, or you can write what you want to write and try to align that with a market later.

Writing for a market

Some examples of the first way to write are prompted contests or writing challenges and anthology calls. In this case the market is the competition, the site hosting the challenge, or the anthology. You’re going to have a sense already of what the market wants in terms of something to include in your story (or essay, for nonfiction calls for submission), but that’s not where you should stop.

See, in most cases you’ll be more successful in getting published if you and your target market share an audience. So you’ll need to look at what’s been successful in that market before, and think about what the audience is. Is it adults who share a penchant for body horror and multisubject complex sentences? Or are you noticing a lot of simple sentence structures, no swearing or violence, and young characters? Maybe that’s targeting a middle grade or YA audience. Pay attention to the voice of the previously published works – it will tell you who the audience is. Also pay attention to the gaze (spoilers if you can’t see the gaze it’s probably because you’re either used to stories written for your gaze, or you’re in a situation where the gaze of the story matches the dominant gaze of the culture you’re immersed in). What assumptions are previous writers making about what the audience knows? Remember that the stories you’re reading have been edited and are targeting the market’s desired audience, so if you don’t write in a similar voice or for a similar gaze, you are unlikely to be successful placing your work with that market.

Something we wish we didn’t have to say to marginalized writers: Even if a market is specifically calling for submissions from marginalized writers, they may not be prepared to engage with your work where it deviates from the dominant gaze. You’ll want to be clear with yourself before you submit what kinds of changes you are and are not comfortable making in your work to fit into the way that market sees its audience.

Finding your market

With the second writing style, the writing may go a little faster, but the publishing is likely to go a lot slower. And you should be prepared to make significant edits along the way. This is what your process will probably end up looking like.

• Write a story
  • Check your word count
  • Identify your genre(s)
  • Identify your audience
    • maturity level (middle grade, YA, adult)
    • demographic (what’s their background?)
    • affinities (what else do they enjoy reading? This is why you’ll see a lot of submission form letters suggesting “Like Hornblower, but with dragons” – it’s a way to describe audience)
  • Identify your market
    • the market should be publishing work that matches all your answers above
    • if you can’t find a market like that, you are probably going to have to edit your work to match the closest market.

You can do some shortcuts to this process with standardized expectation spreadsheets, like “horror stories are typically X words long and science fiction are Y words, so if I have a story that could be either but it’s Y words long,
I should either edit it to X words or not look at horror markets because I’m unlikely to find one that wants a story of a significantly different length.” This will save you some time looking at all the possible markets for a horror story by knowing going in that you won’t find one that matches your wordcount.

Even if you prefer to write and then submit, you will do yourself all kinds of favors by reading a lot of calls for submissions (and agents’ wishlists, for longer work). They will give you a sense of what length of works are generally desirable, and the kinds of things markets in the genres you like to write are looking for.

Some words about gaze

Gaze can help connect with your target audience, or it can alienate them. And that alienation can come from what seems like little things from your point of view, because of social parallax. Sometimes it’s easier to laugh than cry, so here’s a humorous piece examining the way American Dirt (touted as an “authentic Latino novel”) is written. And here’s one on why that matters. Confused about how this links up with gaze? Try this quote:

“[the main character] experiences shock after shock when confronted with the realities of México, realities that would not shock a Mexican.”

See, the reason that a white writer can produce a book about Mexico from the point of view of a Mexican character that’s touted as “authentic” not just by other white writers but by Oprah, for example, is gaze. It’s written for (through, with) a gaze that is fundamentally not any kind of Mexican gaze, but because the people reading it from those other places of social parallax find that it matches their expectations of how Latine characters would think and speak, or how they would feel in the situations the POV character is in, it feels authentic to them.

Side note, this is one of those places where a sensitivity reader or cultural competency reader could have saved someone a lot of embarrassment and money later.

One of the trickiest but most important tasks is to make sure that the narrative is written with your narrator or POV character’s gaze. It’s not always as complex as a different culture can be; sometimes it’s as simple as the appropriate capacity for analysis and understanding of a child the age of your narrator. Very few 12 year olds think in structures like “Mommy is very tall. She loves me very much. Sometimes she has friends over. I do not like her friends. Mommy is my person not theirs.” Tweens are capable of much deeper analysis of interpersonal relationships than that.

Again, why does it matter? It might not! If your target audience is “people just like me” and not “people who might feel represented by this work if I do it well” then maybe you’re not interested in gaze. But we think you probably still should be, if only for the embarrassment factor of becoming a trending hashtag for the wrong reasons.

In conclusion…

We know it feels like we crammed a lot of subjects into this month, but it’s really just “who are you writing for, and how do you get it to them?” With a side order of “and how do you do that better?” 

Making sure you hit the targets for your markets – and that you know what those targets are – is going to improve your chance of being published. And having a solid grasp on gaze can improve your chances of getting not just read but positively reviewed. We know it feels a little commercial, but we’re also working in an industry and whatever you can do to optimize your odds and max your positive reviews is going to help you tremendously.

And all that is a side effect of being able to produce a story that will make someone feel seen in a way they maybe never have before. 

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society. 

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place once a month. This month’s meeting is still TBD but will take place during the last week of the month. Stay tuned to our mailing list for the exact date! (Not on our mailing list? Sign up here!) Future dates and times TBD based on member and guest availability, but we’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible. (Yeah. We know. It’s best to have a fixed time. But we think it’s even better than best to be able to accommodate a diverse slate of exciting and qualified panelists, and we hope you’ll agree.)

You can also sign up for a monthly membership! Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session. 
• $5 monthly subscription (Pen level): Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where we can discuss tropes in more detail, and your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors! Pen level members can also suggest tropes for future live discussions – our goal is to give you what you want and need!
• $3 monthly subscription (Pencil level): Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded and to the private Discord channel!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists. You can also sign up for a $1/month Paper level membership just to show us you love us.

Index

Wondering what the next meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society will be about? Not sure what we've covered already? Here's our club agenda for the year.

September:

• Read:
• Watch: September meeting

October:

• Read:
• Watch: October meeting

November:

• Read:
• Watch: November meeting

December:

• Read:
• Watch: December meeting

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me